More on the new Book!

Here's a sample from the chapter on Feelings and Emotions:

We often use these two words interchangeably, but they're not the same thing. Emotions are all about our automatic responses to triggers, like hunger, and anger, even happiness. We're not aware of them, and we don't have to be. They'll just happen upon us and will force us to act as our brains do their job of keeping us alive.

Did you know that there are 18 kinds of smiles our faces can make? Only one of these is caused by the emotion of happiness. The others are caused by our thinking about and then creating them. (Try a few; see how many different smiles you can create!)

Feelings, on the other hand, begin when we recognize our emotions and give meanings to them, like calling them love, hate and anger. We are meant to be aware of our feelings, even though they do not necessarily result in actions of any kind.

While have no control over our emotions, we do have a great deal of control over our feelings. As humans, we're so powerful that we can decide to make positive feelings our "default setting." According to Stefan Klein (stefanklein.info), one of Europe's most influential science writers, our brains would even appreciate our doing so! More on that to come....

New Book; Working Title

I'm thinking of calling the new book

Human: A Practical Philosophy

As I mentioned, this book stands at the intersection of being a human and what neuroscience has discovered about humans. I call it the philosophy of why a human is an extraordinary thing to be. It looks at feelings, emotions, thinking and memory - the hard science of these as well as my own life experiences of them. It also considers love, and fear, intuition and even imagination, the "soft" and the "hard science" aspects of these familiar human characteristics. And, of course, it is the story of how our one-of-a-kind, inner voices are at the center of who we are, what we know, and the proof that we can make smart and healthy choices and decisions in our lives.

After all, each one of us is the "expert" on us!

Let me know what you think of the title!

Starting Over...again

Do you ever feel that you want to start over again with a project in your life? One of the best things about being a human is that we can do that, over and over again, until we feel we're doing things just the way we want them to be.

That's what I'm doing, right now. I've been pretty busy since my last entry, and I want to bring you up to date. Then, I want to start over, by writing much more often than I have in the past, to keep you posted.

For one thing, I've moved back to New York City. For another, I'm just finishing up a book I've been working on, and I'm very excited about getting it out there to share with you!

As many of you already know (since I've been talking about it so much), it stands at the intersection of being a human and what science has discovered about being a human. Specifically, that's what neuroscience says, through brain imaging studies I've been reading and telling you about. I've been learning wondrous things about my own brain. As I've gotten to know how it operates and appreciate that its only goal is to help me thrive and survive, I want to help it. In some ways, it's become my new best friend - isn't that funny?! After all, it is the place where my inner voice lives, and you already know what I think of that great friend.

I'll be writing a lot more about this in coming weeks. I look forward to sharing it with you!